Friday, December 13, 2013

In Jersey City, Mayor Steven Fulop (D) is undertaking a small step toward gun safety at the local level through the process for soliciting gun vendors.
He will disseminate a survey to all vendors bidding to supply firearms
to local law enforcement asking how they handle gun safety issues,
including whether they take steps to prevent illegal gun trafficking. In
responding to the initiative, National Rifle Association Board Member
Scott Bach blasted Fulop on NRA News, citing the fact that Fulop’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors as a reason why he should “get it.”
Fulop, a former Marine who worked on Wall Street, has explained his
initiative as seeking to insert the same accountability into the gun
industry as exists in others. “Nearly every other industry, from
construction to the garment industry, has some social responsibility
component, he said, so why not gun manufacturers, dealers and vendors?”
he told the Associated Press.
But Bach claimed Fulop is “politicizing” the process of firearms
contracts, and called for vendors to boycott Jersey City. As Media
Matters reports, he explained on NRA News’ Cam & Company:

Succeeding [the previous mayor] is a guy named Steve
Fulop, who is actually relatively young, but it seems like it’s a
requirement if you’re going to be a Jersey City mayor you have to by
default be anti-gun. And here is the interesting thing about this guy,
Cam. He’s an ex-Marine. Well, what I should say is, he worked for
Goldman Sachs in the financial industry and was close to 9-11 when it
happened and he was motivated to join the Marines for a few years, which
he did. His grandparents were Holocaust survivors according to Wikipedia. So you’ve got to wonder why he is not getting it.

Comparing gun control to the Holocaust is one of a number of faulty and offensive analogies
the gun rights movement has used to illegitimize gun reform measures.
The NRA and others have repeatedly claimed that gun violence prevention
is like Hitler’s fascism because Hitler took away the guns of Holocaust
victims, who could have overcome the regime if they had them. This claim
has been repeatedly debunked as both logically and historically inaccurate, because, unsurprisingly, taking away guns was only one of infinite ways in which the Nazis suppressed an uprising. That’s probably why even those who did acquire guns were unsuccessful in fighting back.